


The Boyfriendinator

by JeannetteRankin



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Family, Avengers Tower, Comic Book Science, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dating, Domestic Avengers, Fluff, M/M, Post-Avengers (2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 12:11:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2811542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeannetteRankin/pseuds/JeannetteRankin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony is not a cuddler, and tries to fix this with INVENTIONS. Steve/Tony fluff involving cuteness, cuddling, and Tony being ridiculous. (Assumes the usual post-Avengers, pre-IM3 verse we all used to write Steve/Tony in like two years ago.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boyfriendinator

**Author's Note:**

> Steve/Tony? Who even reads Steve/Tony anymore?? I barely even do! But the other day, in the shower, I was suddenly struck with the mental image of the Boyfriendinator and my hands were possessed with the spirits of pairings past and this came out. Not beta'd, apologies for any errors. Feedback (here or [on tumblr](http://jeannetterankin.tumblr.com/)) is welcomed and cherished, as the author is a lonely, desperate person.

The first time they tried sleeping together, as in actually sleeping, in a bed, at the same time, and not just having a quickie after a mission or collapsing from exhaustion together in one of the not-too-comfortable bunks in the back of the quinjet, it didn't go exactly as Tony had expected.

Oh, sure, the evening had started with a dinner for two at one of Tony's favorite restaurants, one he'd been meaning to take Steve to for months, even before they started _this_. It wasn't like the trying-too-hard ultra-modern places that Tony occasionally frequented when trying to impress a date or when he was forced to act civilized and try to charm a business partner. And it wasn't one of those ultra-healthy macro-paleo-locovore-vegan Chelsea monstrosities that Pepper had taken him to occasionally during their late, lamented romance. Instead, this was an old family-owned place in Murray Hill his mom had use to take him to when he was a kid and that he'd loved ever since. Hell, the place had probably been there since Steve was young. Just nice ambiance, good service, and great food.

Much to Tony's satisfaction, Steve _had_ loved it, and they'd passed the evening--their first actual date--making stupid sappy faces at each other, eating good steak and polishing off two bottles of wine. Afterwards they had both been giggling on their way back to the tower, though at least Tony had the excuse that the wine had gone to his head, and if he hadn't been distracted with much more important things like making out in the back of the town car, he'd have been taking mental note to hold Steve's non-excuse-having silliness over his head for the rest of his natural life.

But the fact was, he'd had _much_ more agreeable things on his mind than future blackmail material. In the elevator up to their floor, for example, he'd found it utterly absorbing to unbutton Steve's jacket and slide his hands against the delightful firmness of his stomach. Once out of the elevator, he found all of his concentration was taken up by the dual tasks of having his ass grabbed and sticking his tongue into Steve's mouth. Getting undressed out of his suit was subsequently a much greater mental challenge than he'd anticipated, and well, once they got actually naked and on the bed?

After that Tony didn't have any spare brain power at all.

Which is all by way of saying that stages one and two of the evening had gone absolutely to plan; had, in fact, wildly exceeded expectations, which all things _he_ engineered ought to do. That was why it was so frustrating and incomprehensible that stage three was not going well _at all_.

In mounting frustration, Tony reviewed his mental file for “The Perfect Three Step Plan to Get Steve To Be Your Boyfriend.” It ran something like:

> GIVEN, that Steve is incredibly hot and also a really good guy, self-righteous tendencies notwithstanding and,  
>  GIVEN, that you are already banging Steve after missions much to your evident mutual satisfaction, and,  
>  GIVEN, that you'd like to have a great deal more sex with Steve and also make him smile a lot and hang out with him and have him pay attention to you all the time,  
>  IT MAY BE CONCLUDED, that Steve should be your boyfriend.  
>     
>  RECOMMENDED ACTION ITEMS:  
>  Step 1, Take Steve out for a romantic dinner somewhere nice [NB, do not ask Pepper for a recommendation];  
>  Step 2, Have incredibly good sex with Steve in your bed [or his, tbd];  
>  Step 3, Fall blissfully asleep in Steve's arms;  
>  EXPECTED RESULT: Wake up with Steve as your boyfriend. 

He was so close to achieving his objective that being stymied at step three was just irksome. But any good engineer had to be able to face up to the failures of their design, in order to make the next iteration better. So Tony had to admit to himself that after sex, clean up, and disgustingly sweet pillow talk, when he'd rolled over and taken Steve's arm along with him, getting Steve spooned up against his back in a rather nice way, he'd been totally unable to complete step three by falling asleep.

The problem was that, while the first five minutes of having Steve draped all over him like he was his teddy bear had been nice, after that it was just kind of annoying. He'd been lying awake for forty-five minutes waiting for step three to conclude, but it just. Wasn't. Happening. The most pressing problem, Tony concluded, was that Steve kept _breathing_ on him. Little puffs of sleeping breath were blowing across his ear and tickling the hair around it. Every time he might have gotten close to falling asleep, a particular little sleeping snuffly sigh would come from Steve. While admittedly adorable, this was throwing Tony off his game, stage-three-completion-wise.

The problem was, Pepper had never been a cuddler, so it had never been an issue before. Before Pepper, he'd seldom stayed in bed all night with anyone, and when he did it was almost always because he'd passed out drunk there. And then there had only been Pepper, and now Steve--the only two people he'd been with since he stopped the whole one-night-stand shebang--so at this highly inconvenient time, he was only just now discovering this set of challenges inherent in cuddling.

He gave it another fifteen minutes before admitting total failure, and decided to use his time being sleep-cuddled by Steve to mentally revise his plan for the next iteration. Plan Get Steve to Be Your Boyfriend Mark II. Around two a.m., he had a revelation. The perfect idea that would fix everything and make the Boyfriend Plan Mark II a total success.

There was no point in lying there any longer, and now he had work to do, so Tony pressed a kiss to Steve's forehead, who murmured indistinctly at him in his sleep, then slipped out of bed and headed down to his workshop to get started.

It was probably around six in the morning when Steve came down and found him urgently tinkering with a holographic design in his workshop. Steve walked right over, striding straight through the holograms and blocking Tony's view.

“Hey--” Tony started to protest, when Steve cut him off with a long, lingering kiss.

“Hey,” Tony said in a different voice when Steve pulled back a little, and let his arms go around Steve's hips where he was standing in front of Tony's stool in the vee of his legs.

“Good morning,” was the slightly smiling reply that he got. “I was really hoping for a good morning kiss, I just didn't realize I'd have to take an elevator to get it.”

“Sorry,” Tony said, absently, since it didn't seem like Steve was really mad, and even as though he was still pretty open to the idea of becoming Tony's boyfriend. “Had an idea, it couldn't wait.” While he had them there, he figured he might as well use his hands to stroke up and down Steve's back muscles in appreciation.

“No rest from that brain of yours, is there?” Steve said, leaning down for another, shorter kiss.

“I don't know, you did a pretty good job of shutting it off last night,” Tony could flirt with the best of them, and he didn't want to miss any chance to impress Steve with his boyfriendly qualities.

Steve grinned, pleased, at that. “Come upstairs for coffee?” He offered.

“In a bit. I just want to finish up what I'm working on.” Tony sent him away and took the time out of his work to give a fond lingering gaze at Steve's ass as he walked out of the lab before turning back to his project. If that ass didn't make him determined to succeed at his plan, nothing would.

Plan Make Steve Your Boyfriend Mark II went into motion the very next night.

Steps 1 and 2 were unchanged, except that this time it was a little Thai-fusion bistro in the West Village, and he got even handsier on the ride back, getting to the point where Steve had had to slow him down, insisting that they be in relatively decent shape for the elevator ride, in case they ran into any of their teammates before making it to the bedroom. The sex was even better than the night before, with both of them getting to know the maps of each other's bodies and putting that knowledge to highly productive use.

Once again, their post-sex clean-up and settle-in portion of the evening went smashingly, with pillow talk gently easing into contented silence until Tony, unwilling to put it off any longer and eager to test out his improvements, went for Step Three. He curved into Steve's embrace and hooked one big arm over himself, just like before. And, just like the night before, it didn't take long at all for Steve to drop off and start _breathing_ on Tony.

This time, though, this time, Tony was ready. He reached up to the hidden slot in the headboard where he'd stealthily concealed the device earlier in the day and pressed the tapped the tiny touch screen twice. The device softly hummed to life and deployed.

Within 2.5 seconds--well within specifications--Tony stopped feeling the breath on his ear. Success! The Boyfrendinator, a discreet miniature-arc-reactor-powered hoverbot was now creating a small force shield between him and Steve, deflecting the offending breaths harmlessly away. It had built-in steering and detection capabilities to keep up with any movement during the night, and was designed to monitor Steve's biorhythms and to safely retract and hide itself away at the first signs that Steve was waking up. With any luck, Steve would never even know that it existed and now Tony could get a good night's sleep and wake up in Steve's arms, _boyfriend accompli_.

That's what should have happened, anyway.

Instead, it turned out, there was another fatal flaw in Tony's plan, which had been hidden under the _original_ fatal flaw, and which Mark II had failed to take into account. After successfully deflecting the little puffy breaths, which had so clearly been the problem the night before, another problem was now making itself obvious. Namely, that the arm he'd draped himself with was damned heavy.

In the normal course of events, he adored and respect Steve's muscly arms, and considered them one of the major perks of Steve's super-soldier body. They were good arms: bulgy in the right places, firm, well-shaped, and capable of holding Tony down on the bed with an ease that might be alarming if they were attached to someone Tony wanted to fuck less desperately than Steve.

Now, however, he'd discovered a downside. Steve's arm was resting on his ribs. The damn thing must weigh twenty pounds, and while it didn't make it actually hard to breathe, the compression was irritating to say the least. It was distracting, making him far too conscious of his breathing to allow it to even out into the rhythm of sleep. Tony gave it an hour anyway, thinking he could wait it out, before he gave up. Even with the Boyfriendinator humming merrily away, doing its job perfectly, being the pinnacle of engineering that Tony had perfected in less than eighteen hours, it looked like Plan Mark II was also going to end in failure.

Sighing and slipping out from under Steve's arm with a small groan, he considered turning the Boyfriendinator off, but then shrugged and decided to leave it running. He still wanted the performance data. Maybe it was marketable? Surely other people had potential significant others who breathed on them during the night.

Again he retreated to his lab, but this time it only resulted in frustration. He spent hours delving into potential designs for arm slings, arm rests, some kind of chest plate for himself, but nothing he could come up with even remotely fit the specs of effectiveness and discretion. He needed Steve not to notice whatever he came up with, just like the Boyfriendinator. Because, honestly, who would want to be boyfriends with someone who made them put their arm into a special hydraulic sling before sleep? No one, that's who. Certainly not someone as well-adjusted as Steve.

Overall it was one of the more frustrating lab sessions Tony could ever remember having. The only highpoint was Steve coming down for another morning kiss and an offer to take him out for breakfast, which Tony declined in favor of staying behind to work on an arm-specific anti-grav device.

Unfortunately, that didn't pan out either.

Exhausted from two nights running with no sleep, Tony wandered into the shared living quarters sometime around noon and passed out on one of the couches. He woke up a few hours later to find that there was an Avengers movie night going on around him, and that Steve had maneuvered Tony's head into his lap and was stroking his hair.

Deciding that moving was far too much effort, Tony enjoyed just lying there, half-heartedly paying attention to the terrible Jean Claude Van Damme movie on the screen, listening to Clint and Thor bicker about the movie's fight scenes, and enjoying the sensation of Steve stroking his hair.

When the movie ended, Steve tried to coax him to bed, but Tony was far too tired to enact a Boyfriend Plan Mark III, even if he'd had one, which he didn't. So he just steered Steve to his own room, gave him a small goodnight kiss, and then wandered off to bed alone to get a night of uncuddled, uninterrupted rest. His last thought as he drifted off was a worry that, if he didn't sort this out soon, he'd never get Steve to be his boyfriend.

At 7:30 in the morning, Tony sat bolt upright in his bed, struck with a revelation. He'd been hazily dreaming about last night, and Steve stroking his hair, when suddenly the thought struck him. They'd essentially been cuddling for _hours_ , and Tony had slept right through it. The answer was obvious.

Tony, mentally formulating a pleasingly simple and elegant Boyfriend Plan Mark III, went down to breakfast, absently kissing Steve good morning and accepting a mug of coffee from him.

“Dinner tonight?” He asked.

“Sure,” Steve replied happily, standing at the kitchen island with a bowl of oatmeal.

Tony spent a very productive day in his workshop, energized and feeling the ideas flowing, working on projects totally unrelated to the Boyfriend thing. Rhodey had been bugging him for upgrades, and he'd had some ideas for Nat's Widow's Bite, which she'd finally relented and allowed him to work on, under a strict promise not to make any changes without consulting her (on pain of unspecified but horrible consequences).

At seven thirty sharp, he picked Steve up, which meant going upstairs and poking his head into the library to say “ready?” Dinner at a quiet bistro on the Upper West Side went off splendidly, and only Steve's insistence on taking the subway to and from prevented Tony from giving the riders of the 2 train golden youtube material until they were safely back home. As soon as they were alone, however, he made up for lost time and got his greedy hands on as much of Steve as possible in as short a time as he could. Steve seemed to appreciate his efforts, panting into Tony's open mouth and giving as good as he got.

This time, Tony had to be more strategic when it came to Step Three. The modifications for Mark III had entailed a significant change. When Tony noticed Steve's eyes drooping and breaths slowing down, in the middle of listening to Tony ramble on about one of his early engineering successes, he struck. Instead of pulling Steve's arm over him, making Steve the big spoon to his little spoon, as had been his mistake the first two times, Mark III relied on a new positioning schema.

It had occurred to him that the reason he'd been able to sleep with his head in Steve's lap, but not with Steve spooning him had to do with _position_. He'd been thinking about this all wrong, leading to a fundamental error. He's started out with too narrow a definition of “wake up in his arms” and thus failed to consider that there was more than one configuration that could lead to the accomplishment of Step Three. Hence, Mark III, which called for Tony, rather than being the little spoon, to make sure Steve fell asleep on his back and then lie down half on top of Steve, with his head resting on Steve's chest.

At first, this seemed to work splendidly. But Tony should have learned by now not to trust the appearance of success with anything in Plan Get Steve To Be Your Boyfriend. He nestled his head against Steve's rather lovely chest, and it eliminated the first two problems entirely. Steve was breathing more or less directly upward, so his breath didn't bother Tony at all. And, though Steve did rest his arm around him, with one hand on Tony's shoulder, it was much less like having a log laying across your ribs, and in fact, didn't bother his breathing at all.

For about ten minutes after Steve dropped off, Tony was sure that this was it and Mark III was going to be a splendid success and lead to him waking up in the arms of one brand spanking new boyfriend. (Not that they'd tried spanking yet. Maybe after he got the boyfriend thing sorted out.)

Then his arm fell asleep.

Tony bravely resisted the urge to curse a blue streak, predicting that waking up your bed partner with impassioned yelling about the failings of the human circulatory system was not the best path to romantic success.

Although in this position he could rest one arm against Steve's chest like a heroine on the cover of a romance novel, with Steve playing the part of shirtless Fabio, his other arm had to be curled up underneath himself. He spent fifteen minutes working imaginary wire-model figures in his head, but couldn't come up with any other solution that would allow him to rest his head comfortably on Steve's chest and not result in his arm falling asleep and him waking up with horrible muscle cramps.

The only thing he could think of was to re-create their positions from movie night by lying perpendicular to Steve and resting his head on Steve's thigh, so that his lower arm could be sticking straight out without hitting anything, and no way was he doing that. That would propel him well outside of the Boyfriend Zone into the depths of Hot Weirdo Triangle.

With grim determination, he crept out of bed, shook the feeling back into his arm, and headed back to the lab, muttering about pins and needles and super-soldiers, to get to work on Mark IV. Contrary to the impression he tried to give the press and occasionally even his team-mates, he hadn't become an engineering genius by having everything work perfectly the first time. Trial and error, that was the secret. Surely, the fourth time would be the charm.

Needless to say, Mark IV was also a complete failure. He took a day to work out his frustrations by sparring with his team-mates and letting Clint thoroughly beat him up.

Mark V got derailed by a supervillain attack. He kept going. Mark VI was a re-iteration of Mark III, but with subcutaneous implants to improve the blood flow and circulation in his arms so that he could sleep on them all night, and it might have really worked, except that JARVIS ratted him out to Pepper, who flew all the way in from California to sternly forbid any elective body modifications.

On the plus side, he got to take Pepper out for a nice dinner, which was a welcome change of pace, if only because there was no looming pressure to enact new cuddle technology at the end of it.

Humiliation was the only result of Mark VIII, and it was really a good thing that Steve was a better person than Tony, because he wasn't likely to bring it up again in the future. If their positions had been reversed, Tony would have lorded those photos over Steve _forever_. Mark X was scrapped before it could get started when Bruce, with all possible mildness, declined to participate. Mark XI through XIII involved self-hypnosis, which was probably doomed from the start.

By the time Mark XV ended ignominiously, Tony was feeling desperate. He was running out of ideas and also acceptable restaurants. Happily, Mark XVI was destined to be a real break through. Mark XVI, it was going to be a winner, Tony could just feel it. _Game changer_.

The plan had always called for him to _wake up_ in Steve's arms, but it didn't specify that he had to stay there all night. Boyfriend Plan Mark XVI, therefore, was to sneak out of bed as soon as Steve fell asleep, then set the re-purposed Boyfriendinator to monitoring Steve's vitals in conjunction with the house systems, and having it send an alert message through JARVIS just before Steve woke up. That way, Tony could sneak back into the room, insinuate himself back into Steve's arms, and “wake up” with him as planned. The elegance of this plan took Tony's breath away the moment it occurred to him, which was not unusual, considering that he was often overwhelmed by his own brilliance.

The sneaking out after Steve fell asleep part of the plan went off without a hitch, after all he'd had fifteen failed iterations of this plan so far to practice. He was adept at waiting until Steve drifted into blissful post-coital slumber, then stealthily creeping out of bed and spending the night catching up on work, until he eventually inevitably fell asleep either in the workshop or on a sofa. The entire Boyfriend project had wreaked havoc with his circadian rhythms--not that they had ever been too stable to begin with. On the night that Tony implemented Mark XVI, he stayed in the workshop until around three in the morning, then sacked out in the living room not too far from his and Steve's (well, technically probably just his, because Steve hadn't actually become his boyfriend yet, because the first fifteen plans had all failed, which was _really becoming a problem_ ) bedroom.

Given that he'd only gotten perhaps six hours of sleep out of the past forty-eight, Tony probably should have anticipated that he'd have trouble waking up when the alarm from the Boyfriendinator went off. It detected the subtle changes to Steve's heart rate, breathing, and blood flow that indicated he was about to wake up, with what should have been enough time for Tony to return to feign wake-up cuddles. Unfortunately, Tony woke, blearily, to the sinking knowledge that the beeping Steve Alarm had been going off for several minutes, while he'd lain there, half-asleep, mostly thinking the beeping was part of the strange dream he'd been having about driving a garbage truck.

By the time he'd cursed and dragged himself into the bedroom, not in any kind of mood to cuddle, Steve was already stirring, stretching one arm over his head and groaning. Watching Steve stretching, all that glorious genetically enhanced skin and muscle laid out before his eyes, with the morning light just starting to creep in through the windows, lighting up a sliver of his chest and shoulders, dumbfounded Tony a bit. All he could do was stand there and stare, plan momentarily forgotten. Steve's eyes slit open and he caught sight of Tony in the doorway. He immediately smiled and said “Morning,” in a warm scratchy voice that compelled Tony toward the bed without him even having to make a conscious decision.

“Hey,” Tony said, leaning over him. Steve pushed himself up on one arm to kiss him. Tony was so distracted by the kiss he didn't notice Steve tugging him down, and before he knew it, Steve executed a perfectly timed moved and Tony was flipped into the bed, on his back, with Steve's face smirking above his. No earthly force could resist that face, and Tony wisely didn't even try, he just immediately kissed it.

After a few minutes of extremely productive making out, Steve pulled back. Tony, looking up at Steve's freshly-kissed morning face, reflected that this was the whole point of the plan right here.

“Why don't we do that more often?” Steve asked. There wasn't anything in his tone, really, just a pleasurable expression of being happy to have Tony there with him to make out with. And had Tony been in a more stable frame of mind, he probably would have been capable of responding in a similarly lighthearted fashion.

Instead, he abruptly pulled away and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and put his face in his hands.

“Tony?” Steve said behind him, sounding slightly alarmed. He rested one hand on Tony's back. “What is it?”

“I've been trying!” Tony said in what may or may not have been an extremely petulant tone of voice. At this point he really couldn't be held responsible for what he was saying. “Why do you think I've been sneaking off every night?”

“What? You weren't just, I dunno, working?” Steve's voice was confused and laced with concern, like he was afraid Tony might be having a mental breakdown of some kind.

“Well, YEAH,” Tony exclaimed. Before he could stop himself, his confession was spilling out. “But only because I can't sleep! I just can't. I've tried, but I cannot get a good night's sleep when you're cuddling me.” There it was, out in the open. He wasn't a cuddler, and now Steve would never be his boyfriend, and Tony would die alone.

“Wait, that's why you've been out of bed every night?” Something about Steve's tone made Tony turn around to see him looking at Tony like he was seeing some kind of alien.

“Obviously. I've been doing my best to accommodate your need to cuddle,” Tony told him, emphasizing his concern for Steve's needs that he felt made him an excellent potential boyfriend. Not that it mattered now that he was destined for spinsterhood.

To Tony's utter astonishment, Steve rubbed the back of his own neck with one hand, abashed, and said, “Actually, I don't really like it either.”

“You ...don't?” Tony said, mind going to a complete blank. “But you, well, look at you, you're so obviously a cuddler. You cuddled with me almost every night for the past month.”

“That was always your idea,” Steve told him. “I mean, you seemed like you were dead set on it, so I went along. But it's actually kind of uncomfortable. That thing,” he indicated the arc reactor, “Has sharp edges, and your legs are kind of hairy...” Steve trailed off awkwardly.

“You're complaining about my leg hair?” Tony squawked.

“No! Not complaining, exactly. It's not like I want you to shave it or anything,” Steve hastily backtracked, looking increasingly aghast at the words coming out of his own mouth. “It's just kind of like sandpaper, you know? It's, um, itchy.” He ended lamely.

Tony gaped at him. “I am so offended right now. I don't know when I've ever been more offended. I have beautiful, shapely legs,” he told Steve sternly. “And hair is a natural part of the human body. I can't believe you're trying to shame me about my leg hair. There is no way I'm shaving them, just so you know, so you might as well get used to it, Captain Nair--”

“Please stop,” Steve told him, and put one hand over Tony's mouth, gently. Tony glared indignantly at him, but didn't bother moving away. Steve leaned over and placatingly placed a kiss on Tony's forehead. “Sorry. I like your legs, and all the other parts of you, too.”

“Fine,” Tony said, freeing his mouth. “Apology accepted. So you're just saying that you don't want to cuddle with me?”

“Not all night, anyway,” Steve admitted sheepishly. “It's not really 'my thing,'” he said, sounding as awkward as he ever did when he tried to use modern idioms. At least Tony had gotten him to stop using air quotes when he did it.

“But I wanted,” Tony began, trying to think of a way to explain the genesis of his plan in a way that didn't make him seem like too much of an Unboyfriendable Weirdo. “I wanted this to be serious, that's the whole reason why I came up with Plan Make Steve Your Boyfriend.” Judging by the look on Steve's face, he'd shot the non-weirdo part in the foot.

“Aren't we already?” Steve asked. “We've been sleeping together most nights, and we go out to dinner all the time, and we talk about pretty much everything. So I figured,” he shrugged. “That I was your fella already. I mean, if that's what you want.” Steve now looked sheepish again.

“So you're saying I don't have to wake up in your arms?” Tony said, with the dawning hope that maybe the problem that had tormented him for weeks was not as intractable as he'd feared. In fact, he might have already succeeded in his end goal without even realizing it.

“No, not really. I do like waking up with you near me, though,” Steve admitted with a look on his face like just being near Tony was like Christmas and rainbows. Tony's heart melted, which was a common and highly dangerous side effect of dating Steve, he'd found.

“Well, of course you do,” Tony told him. “You have excellent taste.”

“So,” Steve said in his tactical planning voice. “How about this? You stay in bed all night--unless you really do have work to do, which is fine by the way--but just to sleep, no touching. And then in the morning, an option on limited cuddling, of no more than fifteen minutes duration.”

“I suppose that would be acceptable,” Tony said, considering. “Though I do have one condition.”

“What's that?” Steve asked.

“In between waking up in-the-same-bed and fifteen minutes of cuddling, let's add morning sex.” He wasn't a genius for nothing, after all.

“You drive a hard bargain.” Steve--Tony's boyfriend--told him cheerfully.

“I'll show you a hard bargain.”

Steve yelped, either at the bad pun or at the sudden hand on his ass, it was hard to say which. Tony rolled them over so that he was he was lying on top of Steve, smiling down at him.

No time like the present for putting into motion Plan Now That Steve is Your Boyfriend, Take Advantage of That a Lot.


End file.
